BosNet ARTICLE: Sarajevans Amazed By War

From: Davor <dwagner@mailbox.syr.edu>

Steeled against hoping too much by 3 1/2 years of war,
battle-hardened Sarajevans have been amazed by nightly TV images
bombarding their living rooms.
For nearly a week, state-run television has carried video and live
interviews from battlefields across western and central Bosnia, where the
government army, in places backed by its Croat allies, has overrun rebel
Serb positions. Scenes of captured, flower-bedecked tanks carrying home
victorious soldiers have replaced the footage most had become inured to --
images of shattered bodies lying in pools of blood in the streets of
Sarajevo and other Serb-besieged cities.
"Dear Bosnians, come home! The time has come, your homes are free
and waiting for you," Gen. Mehmed Alagic, whose forces scored one of the
early victories in taking Donji Vakuf last week, told television Sunday
night from the central Bosnian town.
Serbs held about 70 percent of Bosnia through much of the war.
Now, the split is approaching 50-50.
On Sunday morning, Semir Alic, 38, told his wife and children,
refugees in Germany, to start packing for their return to Bosnia. "By the
time she packs and gets the visas for the trip, it'll be over," he said
after he talked to his wife.
The euphoria has reached such proportions that some Bosnians are
daring to suggest the army retake the entire country instead of settling
for the 51 percent it has committed to in international peace
negotiations. "This is the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina so we are
entitled to liberate our territory," Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic said
Sunday.
Asked if he felt the Bosnians were in the driver's seat for the
first time in the war, Silajdzic savored the question a moment, then
replied: "In the driving seat? Oh, yes. The answer is yes."
Some diplomats and international negotiators are concerned that
the euphoria will get out of control and tempt the Bosnian army to go too
far. There is concern that they will try to take Banja Luka, the Bosnian
Serbs' largest city, and risk pulling the army of Serb-led Yugoslavia into
the conflict and reigniting an all-out war.
Sunday night's television showed thousands of joyous Bosnian
refugees, waving flags from their car windows, returning home to Bihac in
the northwest, where a Bosnian-Croat offensive ended a Serb blockade in
August. Television said 3,000 of the returning men had joined the Bosnian
Army's 5th Corps, headquartered in Bihac.
Among the developments bringing cheers from TV viewers were
reports that the 5th Corps has captured a string of villages in the
northwest, overrun by the Serbs early in the war. Those successes have
left Bosnian soldiers just 25 miles west of Banja Luka.
The Serbs claimed Sunday that they had stabilized the front lines.
People in Sarajevo are charting battlefield gains with pencils and maps as
they watch the nightly news. They use pencils to mark the changing front
lines, convinced they will have to erase them tomorrow to add more land.
Everybody knows by heart the chronological order of the nine cities and
towns recaptured from the Serbs in less than a week. Many had assumed
those places were gone forever.
"I wish I would have been there when Vozuca was taken," said Seval
Kulenovic, a 27-year-old Bosnian soldier. The capture of the small town in
north-central Bosnia secured the highway linking Zenica and Tuzla, two of
the government's largest cities.
As he spoke, he watched TV pictures of captured Serb tanks and
other weapons being paraded through Tuzla as Bosnian soldiers waved to
cheering crowds lining the streets.
Live telephone interviews with generals in the field, describing
their victories, have become a new feature of the nightly news. TV
newscaster Senad Hadzifejzovic has had trouble containing his euphoria on
air. "As of this moment this news broadcast has no concept," he said,
looking a bit flustered as he shuffled pieces of paper being rushed to him
live on air. "The good news is overtaking itself."